SignWriting and Unicode

[Steve Slevinski]

Hi Albert,

Albert Bickford wrote:
> Unicode is a system for representing a character in a very small 
> number of bytes, on the order of 5-10
We are using a 16-bit coded character set called the x-iswa-2008.  Each 
symbol can be represented with only 2 bytes.  You can view the code 
pages for the x-iswa-2008.  If all goes well, next year I will write an 
Internet Draft so that the x-iswa-2008 can be accepted as an official 
character set of the internet.
http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle/swis/data.php

> it is not necessarily the case that a Unicode implementation of 
> SignWriting would need to make room for 33,000+ new symbols.
Unicode contains 16 planes.  I think 10 of these planes are empty.  Each 
plane can contains a 16-bit coded character set.  It's a perfect fit for 
the x-iswa-2008.
> if a Unicode system was developed in which each handshape was 
> represented by only one "codepoint" (...), and there was a second 
> codepoint to represent the rotation and shading, then the number of 
> codepoints required would drop to probably in the range of 500-1000. 
There are 600 BaseSymbols which could be encoded.  A simple translation 
from the 16-bit x-iswa-2008 to an 8-bit BaseSymbol encoding plus two 
4-bit modifying codes (or a single 8-bit code) should be relatively 
easy.  I prefer a simple 16-bit code.

> Unfortunately, my impression is that most of the people who have 
> thought about SignWriting and Unicode have made the assumption that 
> each of the 33,000+ new symbols needs to correspond one-to-one with a 
> Unicode codepoint.
The 16-bit coded character set is the really important development.  The 
previous 18 character symbol name required 144-bits to represent a 
single symbol.  With the x-iswa-2008 we have a simple 16-bit ccs, we 
have 2 way translation between character code and character name, and we 
can check the validity of any character code.

Unicode acceptance would be great, but I'm not sure what problem it 
would solve that the x-iswa-2008 does not solve.

Regards,
-Steve

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